The Moment of Practice: Embodying Psychoanalysis Between Consulting Room and Seminar Room

“The Moment of Practice” is the 4th public event co-sponsored by NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS) and the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality (SGS). This forum is part of an ongoing effort to generate conversations between clinicians and cultural theorists who share interests in gender, sexuality, and psychoanalysis, but who have very few structured opportunities to speak across our different institutional locations.

Our hope is that “The Moment of Practice,” like its predecessors, will generate some shared vocabulary and conceptual tools to talk together about the complexities of practice, inside and outside the clinician’s office, as well as the multiple terrains of embodiment. Can we think of psychoanalysis as several practices — reading and writing, talking and thinking? Certainly it is heteroglossic: previous events have put into conversation not only the academy and the clinic, but classical and relational psychoanalysis, to which “The Moment of Practice” now adds Lacanian psychoanalysis. How can gender and sexuality studies speak with — and learn from — psychoanalytic theory and practice? And vice versa.

These forums exploit the hybridity of psychoanalysis — as Freud said, a body of thought, a mode of research, and a method of treatment. Each of these practices implicates the others, whether performed by academics or by clinicians or by others. In the context of the cross-talk between the clinic and the university, “The Moment of Practice” will foster a discussion of case material that takes into account–naming, elaborating, vaunting, disagreeing with — multiple psychoanalytic allegiances, and multiple feminist critical possibilities, too, in both their clinical and theoretical guises.

Tracy Simon, Psy.D., is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalytic Candidate at New York University’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She maintains a private practice in New York City, where she works with adults, adolescents, couples and families. Dr. Simon was the Executive Co-Director of the New York Institute for Psychotherapy Training (NYIPT), a post-graduate, psychoanalytic training program for child therapists working with at-risk families in the New York City area. She has served on NYIPTs teaching faculty for over 10 years. She was also an Adjunct Clinical Supervisor at the Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology, Yeshiva University in New York City, where she supervises doctoral students in conducting psychotherapy and providing clinical services. Dr. Simon also served as the Clinical Director of the Karen Horney Clinic’s, September 11th Program in New York City, which provided free psychotherapy to World Trade Center survivors.

Stephen Hartman, Ph.D., is a psychologist and psychoanalyst who relocated from New York City to San Francisco in 2006. Prior to becoming a psychoanalyst, Stephen studied and taught political theory at Princeton with a focus on matters of ideology and educational discourse. His interest in the manner by which social and political experience weaves through psychic life and embodiment continues in recent projects that address aspects of interpellated subjectivity, the State in self-states, and collective erotic experience. A series of papers on Reality 2.0 use the lens of cyberspace to reconsider relational psychoanalytic concepts such as loss, mourning, responsibility, and mutual recognition in an unbound field of object relations. He is very excited about a new collaborative project, The Glass Coffin: What Age is Desire?, that approaches desire as the bricolage of investments in — and protests against — age. Stephen received his certificate in psychoanalysis from the NYU Postdoctoral Program and began teaching seminars on gender and sexuality with Muriel Dimen at the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Psychoanalysis. Now living in California, he co-chairs the faculty at PINC, the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, where he is also a member of the Board of Directors. He is co-editor of the journal Studies in Sexuality and Gender and an associate editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues.

André Lepecki (Brazil, 1965) is Associate Professor at the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. He is also a curator, writer and dramaturg. Doctoral degree from NYU (2000). Graduated in Cultural Anthropology at the New University of Lisbon, where he was also a Post-Graduate Junior Research Fellow at the Center for Sociological Studies (1990-3). Author of Exhausting Dance: performance and politics of movement (Routledge 2006), currently translated into 6 languages. He edited the anthologies Of the Presence of the Body (Wesleyan 2004), The Senses in Performance (with Sally Banes, Routledge 2007), and Planes of Composition: Dance Theory and the Global (with Jenn Joy, Seagull Press 2010). His writing has also appeared in Performance Research , The Drama Review , Art Forum , Nouvelles de Danse , among other publications in Europe, Brazil, and the Middle East. He belongs to the editorial board of Performance Research , e-mispherica , inflexions , among other academic journals. He was the curator of the festival Nomadic New York for Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2007). He was the curator of the 2008 and 2009 editions of the performing arts festival IN TRANSIT also at Haus der Kulturen der Welt. His co-curatorial and directorial work on the re-doing of Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (commissioned by Haus der Künst, Munich) received the International Art Critics Association Award for “Best Performance” (2008). In 2010 he co-curated with Stephanie Rosenthal the Archive on Dance and Visual Arts since the 1960s for the exhibition Move: choreographing you, for the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Center, London. Also in 2010 he co-curated with Eleonora Fabião the event Activations, Passages, Processes for ArtCena Festival, Rio de Janeiro.

Muriel Dimen, Ph.D., is a psychoanalyst; Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychology, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; and Professor Emerita of Anthropology, Lehman College (CUNY). On the faculties of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, Adelphi University Derner Institute in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, the Stephen A. Mitchell Center for Relational Psychoanalysis, and other institutes, she is Editor-in-Chief, Studies in Gender and Sexuality , and an Associate Editor, Psychoanalytic Dialogues . She is also a founding board member of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. Muriel Dimen has written Sexuality, Intimacy, Power (Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 2003); Surviving Sexual Contradictions (NY: Macmillan, 1986); and The Anthropological Imagination (NY: McGraw-Hill, 1977). She has edited With Culture in Mind: Psychoanalytic Stories (NY: Routledge, 2011). Her co-edited books are Gender in Psychoanalytic Space: Between Clinic and Culture with Virginia Goldner (NY: The Other Press, 2002); Storms in Her Head: New Clinical and Theoretical Perspectives on Breuer and Freud’s Studies on Hysteria with Adrienne Harris (NY: The Other Press, 2001); and Regional Variation in Modern Greece and Cyprus: Toward an Ethnography of Greece with Ernestine Friedl (Annals, New York Academy of Sciences 263, 1976). A Fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities, New York University, Muriel Dimen practices and supervises in Manhattan.

This event is free and open to the public. Venue is wheelchair accessible.

For more information, please contact CSGS at csgs(at)nyu.edu or call 212-992-9540.